1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for manufacturing antibacterial polyester master batches and antibacterial polyester fibers, and more particularly to a method for manufacturing the polyester master batches and fibers containing nano-silver particles.
2. Description of Related Art
Antibacterial products are becoming increasingly popular because of the high standard of hygiene requirements in our daily lives. This trend extends to the textile industry and had a great development in manufacturing anti-bacterial fibers and cloth.
Antibacterial agents are basically cataloged into two different types, one is an organic antibacterial agent and the other is an inorganic antibacterial agent. An example of the organic antibacterial agent is quaternary ammonium salt, which has poor thermal endurance and can not be applied in thermal processing of plastic products or fiber spinning.
The inorganic antibacterial agents are usually some carriers (such as zeolite) with metal ions (such as Ag+, Zn2+, Cu2+) or some nano-metal particles (such as nano-silver particles), both of which are referred to as effective particles in the following description (reference to U.S. Pat. No. 6,124,221). When manufacturing an antibacterial textile, one method is that the fibers usually are soaked into the inorganic antibacterial agents to attach the carriers or nano-metal particles on surfaces of the fibers. Therefore, the effective particles of the antibacterial inorganic agents are easily washed out during laundering and also cause allergic reactions to users. Another method of manufacturing the antibacterial fibers is by mixing the inorganic antibacterial agents and the polyester and then extruding to form fibers with effective particles (reference to U.S. Pat. No. 5,561,183 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,669,882). However, the antibacterial fibers made by this method are manufactured at low speed and can not be produced on a large scale. Still another method of using the inorganic antibacterial agents is to use effective particles of zeolite, titanium oxide, silver or zinc. After the effective particles are ground, the effective particles are evenly dispersed in a glycol solution. Those effective particles are combined with monomers in an esterification reaction and then the monomers are polymerized to form the antibacterial polyester master batches (reference to China patent No. CN1425704). However, it is not easy to evenly disperse the effective particles of inorganic antibacterial agents in the glycol solution and the manufacturing cost of this method is relatively high.
The present invention has arisen to mitigate or obviate the disadvantages of the conventional methods for manufacturing antibacterial master batches and fibers.